Tuesday, August 08, 2006

that wiggled and wriggled and jiggled inside 'er

Sunday at lunch we were discussing a bizarre statistic.

Blake said that the average person eats eight spiders a year, unknowingly, in his sleep.

The statistic was greeted with appropriate incredulity, and the conversation moved to other topics (e.g., travel to Venus, whether Google is spying on us [Hi, Google!], fraudulent moneymaking schemes, and sleepwalking).

But here at our house the discussion lives on.

No. 3 initially scoffed at the idea, but her resolve was shaken last night. As she was falling asleep she noticed a spider crawling on the ceiling. When she woke up, it wasn't there (or anywhere!).

Are her fears misplaced, a sad manifestation of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy?

Perhaps.

Perhaps not.

I'm just trying to sleep with my mouth closed.

3 comments:

Aaron said...

Just sleep with one of those SARS masks...

Jack said...

Snopes to the rescue!
On the other hand, even an internet rumor can sprout from a seed of truth.

There are dangerous spiders in America, after all...

Jack said...

Blogger ate my HTML!
http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/spiders.htm